March 13, 2013, marks 20 years since the W. M. Keck Observatory began taking observations of the cosmos. Located in arguably one of the most extreme and beautiful places on the planet -- atop Mauna Kea, Hawai'i, 13,803 ft (4,207 m) above sea level -- the twin Keck domes have observed everything from asteroids, planets, exoplanets to dying stars, distant galaxies and nebulae. Seen in this photograph, the Keck I and Keck II telescopes dazzle the skies with their adaptive optics lasers -- a system that helps cancel out the turbulence of the Earth's atmosphere, bringing science some of the clearest views attainable by a ground-based observatory.
To celebrate the last two decades of incredible science, Discovery News has assembled some of the most impressive imagery to come from Keck.

Andrew Cooper/W. M. Keck Observatory

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Starting very close to home, the Keck II captured this infrared image of asteroid 2005 YU55 as it flew past Earth on Nov. 8, 2011.

William Merline, SWRI / W.M. Keck Observatory

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Deeper into the solar system, the Keck NIRC2 near-infrared camera captured this beautiful observation of the oddball Uranus on July 11-12, 2004. The planet's north pole is at 4 o'clock.

Larry Sromovsky (University of Wisconsin)

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This is a mosaic false-color image of thermal heat emission from Saturn and its rings on Feb. 4, 2004, captured by the Keck I telescope at 17.65 micron wavelengths.

W.M Keck Observatory/NASA/JPL-G.Orton

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A nice image of Saturn with Keck I telescope with the near infrared camera (NIRC) on Nov. 6, 1998. This is a composite of images taken in Z and J bands (1.05 and 1.3 microns), with the color scaling adjusted so it looks like Saturn is supposed to look to the naked eye.

Antonin Bouchez (W. M. Keck Observatory)

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This is Saturn's giant moon Titan -- a composite of three infrared bands captured by the Near Infrared Camera-2 on the 10-meter Keck II telescope. It was taken by astronomer Antonin Bouchez on June 7, 2011.

This image of Neptune and its largest Tritan was captured by Caltech astronomer Mike Brown in September 2011. It shows the wind-whipped clouds, thought to exceed 1,200 miles per hour along the equator.

Mike Brown, Caltech / W.M. Keck Observatory

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A color composite image of Jupiter in the near infrared and its moon Io. The callout at right shows a closeup of the two red spots through a filter which looks deep in the cloud layer to see thermal radiation.

UC Berkeley\Keck\Cebu

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HR 8799: Three exoplanets orbiting a young star 140 light years away are captured using Keck Observatory's near-infrared adaptive optics. This was the first direct observation by a ground-based observatory of worlds orbiting another star (2008).

Now to the extremes -- an image of Stephan's Quintet, a small compact group of galaxies.

Bob Goodrich, Mike Bolte, and the ESI team

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The Egg Nebula: This Protoplanetary nebula is reflecting light from a dying star that is shedding its outer layers in the final stages of its life.

W.M. Keck Observatory

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This is WR 104, a dying star. Known as a Wolf Rayet star, this massive stellar object will end its life in the most dramatic way -- possibly as a gamma-ray burst. The spiral is caused by gases blasting from the star as it orbits with another massive star.

W. M. Keck Observatory

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Narrow-field image of the center of the Milky Way. The arrow marks the location of radio source Sge A*, a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

W. M. Keck Observatory/UCLA

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A high resolution mid-infrared picture taken of the center of our Milky Way reveals details about dust swirling into the black hole that dominates the region.

Dr. Mark Morris (UCLA) Keck II, Mirlen instrument

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A false-color image of a spiral galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis.

Galaxy cluster Abell 2218 is acting as a powerful lens, magnifying all galaxies lying behind the cluster's core. The lensed galaxies are all stretched along the shear direction, and some of them are multiply imaged.

The central starburst region of the dwarf galaxy IC 10. In this composite color image, near infrared images obtained with the Keck II telescope have been combined with visible-light images taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The Cat's Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) is located approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth and is known to be an active star-forming region -- the glow of which has been captured in stunning detail by a newly commissioned instrument on the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment, or APEX, telescope.

The instrument, called ArTeMiS, is a wide-field sub-millimeter-wavelength camera that is sensitive to the cool glow from the interstellar dust grains inside the nebula. In this image, the ArTeMiS observation (orange) has been superimposed over the top of an infrared VISTA telescope observation of the same region. Both APEX and VISTA are managed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The recently commissioned ArTeMiS instrument was installed by a team of engineers who had to battle extreme weather conditions on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Atacama Desert, Chile, that saw the APEX control building almost buried in snow.

The effort was worth it, as this stunning new view of the Cat's Paw Nebula shows.